Colloquia

Summary

As additive manufacturing (AM) using Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) continues to evolve from a prototyping tool into a fully industrialized production technology, its growth is increasingly limited by manual, labor-intensive post-processing workflows, including quality management.

Within the context of a European AM initiative, a modular production line is being developed to address these challenges by digitizing and automating post-production. The most recent innovation in this line is the AM-Quality module: a fast, in-line, automated 3D scanning system.

This thesis focuses on evaluating the implications of integrating this emerging technology into the SLS production environment at Oceanz, the largest Dutch SLS manufacturer and the first worldwide to receive an AM-Quality beta-unit.

The research explores the machine’s technical capabilities and measurement performance, defines potential application areas and how they bring value to the organization, and continuously assesses the machine’s fitness for purpose to support the development process and improve the machine from a user perspective. Besides the natively supported applications of automated, reactive inspection and objective quality reporting, a third opportunity emerged: leveraging production-wide quality data to generate process insight and drive continuous, proactive quality improvements.

The thesis’s final development stage focuses on applying the AM-Quality machine as a tool for defect prevention rather than inspection alone. Using python programming, a prototype data-processing workflow was developed that connects real AM-Quality output with production process data. Using the resulting dataset, the work illustrates what such a digital, evidence-based workflow could look like and how it can provide historical insight into the relations between achieved part quality and how they were produced. This is expected to support data-driven decision making for defect prevention, contributing to the long-term goal of zero-defect manufacturing.